Friday, August 29, 2014

10 Shots From Your Glock: What!?

What I know about the shooting of Michael Brown I basically know from CNN. I wasn't there, haven't been there since, and have no business going there.

But as a shooter and concealed carry enthusiast myself, let me say one thing.

The officer fired ten shots, according to the Skype recording now authenticated by the FBI.

What!? Ten shots?

Either someone was a very bad shot or...

Someone was very far away and difficult to hit.

If a bad shot, that's one thing. Maybe in the heat of the moment it's imaginable (?) to miss nine times in self-defense...though very unlikely.

Or...Michael Brown was so far away from the officer that it took ten shots to...what, execute him?

If he was that far away, it doesn't smell like self-defense, to me. But it does smell.

If he was that far away, there was no need for self-defense because, from an unarmed citizen, there is no "imminent threat of great bodily harm or death" -- which is the legal standard for self-defense to be accepted by a court.

And if there was no imminent threat of great bodily harm, then the shooting was...illegal.

Period.

I'm not taking sides here, we all need to wait for all the evidence to come in. That is immutable, unchangeable, and the law and fairness requires it. All witness statements need to be analyzed, have metadata created out of them, and then likeness and differences noted and weighed. Now there is an objective yardstick to be used, which is the recording of the ten gunshots. By that tape measure we can judge the accuracy of the witness statements. In other words we can ask, is what we're hearing on the tape matching up to what the witness is saying? So we finally have a yardstick and it will go a long ways in helping us sort out whose story is accurate and whose story is inaccurate.

Let's give it time. Federal investigations are notoriously slow. I have been involved as a lawyer in many of them. I have had clients under investigation get angry with me because they thought I was delaying things when, in fact, it was the DOJ in Washington that wasn't responding to my inquiries. That's just the nature of the beast.

In the end, we can all imagine various scenarios for what actually happened.

But justice is as justice does. By this I mean, justice is only as good as the investigation in this type of case.

We all need to go back to work and go back to school and do the hardest thing that can be asked of us.